Fusion-io Claims Storage Breakthrough

SAN DIEGO  Can an upstart technology dramatically outdo the price and performance of today's storage area networks (SAN)? That's the claim of Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io, which unveiled its ioDrive here at the Demo conference.

The ioDrive PCI Express card offers the equivalent throughput performance (though not the storage) of a thousand disk drives without the cables, rack storage space and software of a typical SAN, according to Fusion-io CEO Rick White.

Because the ioDrive is silicon-based, it overcomes the inefficiency of mechanical drives. In a demo, White showed the ioDrive moving the equivalent of eight DVDs worth of data in parallel in well under a minute in an HP c-Class blade server. Company officials said they also have a manufacturing agreement with Micron.

Currently in testing with customers, the first ioDrives are slated to be available for purchase later this year. Pricing has not been disclosed.

Fusion-io is promising performance of up to 380 megabytes per second, or 100,000 IOPS, in a single card. "A disk drive can do maybe 100 IOPS, so this is a thousand times faster," said David Flynn, Fusion-io's CTO.

Mike Fisch, storage analyst with the Clipper Group, said the ioDrive leverages NAND Flash to close the mile-wide performance gap between CPUs and storage.

"The vastly superior performance and simplicity of high-density, NAND storage architectures will push aside the old guard of disk and tape," he said in a statement. He also praised the ioDrive for being a cost-effective and green solution.